where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Monday, February 7, 2022

forbidden words

Neil Steinberg recounts in his latest column (Baseball and the word that must not be said, February 7) a story of a famous baseball player who used to enjoy beating up a particular demographic of people with a blackjack.  He happened to refer to these people by a particular word that has been banned from public discourse, unless, of course, you are of that particular demographic, and you can use it as much as you want.

It seems the people whose opinions count the most in our society were more upset by his use of the forbidden word than in the fact he enjoyed physically beating them.  And then Steinberg mentions the school teacher who we’re all sure had no animosity to this particular demographic, but she lost her job anyway, because she mentioned the aforementioned forbidden word in the course of teaching a class about racism. 

So what are we to make of all this?

I would like to offer my observations, and I welcome anyone who has a different opinion to share it with me.

America is built on freedom, and that includes freedom of speech and the press.  No, that does not mean the right to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, but the freedom to engage in an exchange of ideas.  Which also means opinions.  And opinions aren’t required to be approved by a board of certified researchers who tested your opinions for accuracy and impartiality.

That freedom also includes the right to pursue happiness. 

In reflecting on this, I am reminded of the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments, as the Bible relates, were given to the Israel nation by God as the means to govern society.  Oh, there were other rules, but these gave the broad outlines of what the other rules should entail.

And they are revealing.

Elsewhere in the Bible where God tells people how to live life, He talks about the importance of loving your neighbor.  He commands that, but these are not included in the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments makes no mention of our personal feelings toward anyone else or of any responsibility requiring things that we are to do for them.

It does command respect for our parents.

But as far as anyone else, it basically says to leave them alone.

Don’t kill them, don’t try to ruin their marriage, don’t steal from them, don’t make false accusations against them, and just leave what they have alone.  If you don’t do these things, society will be fine.

So what does this have to do with forbidden words?

I submit that banning certain words helps nobody.  Making people conscious of this word does nothing to further the cause of mutual understanding or empathy.  It doesn’t make anyone like anybody more or dislike them any less. 

Are we to assume that this is the only word that hurts people?  Here we are punishing people who are not using the word to hurt people at all.  But I can think of dozens of words that actually do hurt people.  But they don’t hurt people by their mere presence.  They hurt people, because they express the contempt, disregard, hatred, envy, and anger we might have toward that person or peoples.  And that is far worse, though the words themselves are not banned.

Banning words is like tearing down statues.  It makes some people feel better for having done something, but it does nothing to make anyone’s life better.  And the fact that it is used to punish people simply for the crime of uttering it is simply wrong. 

Try harder to rid society of hatred, envy, and anger.  Teach people to love their neighbors and to be kind to them.  That can be hard in a secular society.  It was a lot easier when we allowed religion and God back into our public discourse.

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